‘Which exactly does not suggest a women. We are undermined by delicacy of feeling; we’re not strong enough to express it with brushes. A man can make it a quality, a decorative characteristic, and so we see it. With a woman it’s everything—all over the place—and of no effect. Oh, I assure you, I. Armour is a man.’
‘Who shall stand against you! Let him be a man. He has taste.’
‘Taste!’ exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of her mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she would store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my pretensions, a person of the truest feeling. ‘He sees things.’
‘There’s an intensity,’ I ventured.
‘That’s better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour. Look at that.’ She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six inches by four, in which the light seemed to come and go as it does in a sapphire.
We stood and gazed. It was a tremendous thing; only half a dozen studies with feeling and knowledge in them, but there in that remote fastness thrice barred against the arts a tremendous thing, a banquet for our famished eyes. What they would have said to us in London is a different matter, and how good they really were I do not find the courage to pronounce, but they had merit enough to prick our sense of beauty delightfully where we found them—oh, they were good!
‘Heaven send it isn’t a Tommy,’ said Dora, with a falling countenance. ‘There is something absolutely inaccessible about a Tommy.’
‘How could it be?’ I asked.
‘Oh, there are some inspired ones. But it isn’t—that’s French technique. It’s an Englishman or an American who has worked in Paris. What in the name of fortune is he doing here?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘we have had them, you know. Val Prinsep came out at the time of the Prince of Wales’s visit.’